


ozone and iron

by 8611



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural, F/M, M/M, Multi, Vampires, Violence, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-15
Updated: 2013-01-15
Packaged: 2017-11-25 15:49:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/640482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond is born into it. Q is turned when he's 26. The pack they make is all their own (vampires + werewolves!AU).</p>
            </blockquote>





	ozone and iron

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a silly little one off based on a prompt someone gave me on tumblr. Then I wrote more and now it’s a whole long thing. Semi-serious, semi-self indulgent, semi-there needs to be more OT3. OT3 with fangs, because duh. 
> 
> Beta'd by the super awesome [Quarby](http://quarby.tumblr.com/). <3

The thing is, no one has ever quite gotten it right. There’s no omniscient council of evilness running the show, no ancient Egyptian goddess hell-bent on destroying humans, no leather or guns or insane hijinks. 

The woman who turned Q had been beautiful and catlike, dark hair and dark eyes and pale skin, and she’d done it because he was dying, not because some master had told her to. He was young, but not that exceptionally young for his original time – 26, should have had a wife and children long ago but the world had been upset, uneven and unhappy these last few years, and Q had grown up waiting for relatives and friends to drop dead at a word. 

(The word, this time around, was _plague_ , as per usual.)

Q had been working in a print shop at the time, and, ironically, it wasn’t sickness that was killing him. The city was coming down around their ears, the bills on the church doors were getting longer every day, and by some miracle Q was still standing, although the master printer in the shop had fled the week prior and told Q to hang on as long as possible before shuttering up the little shop off the river. 

He’d been closing up for the day, and for what he suspected would be a while longer, when a roving gang had come in, and there wasn’t much Q could do before he had a dagger sticking out of his stomach as they jumped around the shop, taking anything that wasn’t bolted down. 

Q had slumped down the wall, staring at the hilt, a strange sort of anger washing over him. This was _ridiculous_ – 

She’d found him after they had left, when he was on his side in a pool of blood and his vision had started slipping to black. 

She was old, very old, something he’d learn later. She’d seen Constantinople with the Greeks still in charge, when it was a little speck on an ox ford. But at the moment all Q knew was that she was something out of stories, nightmares. 

“This won’t do,” she said, and he’d reached up for her just as his vision had gone. 

When he’d woken up his head was throbbing, his mouth was bloody, and there was a sense of want curling in his gut so profound that when the woman brought a girl back, long neck and fear on her face, Q hadn’t hesitated. 

He’d lost track of Vesper sometime around when Europe collectively went to shit (the first time). That was fine, because no one had ever gotten that quite right either. There wasn’t some undying bond between maker and fledging, just a relationship of convenience. Two vampires were always going to be stronger than one, after all. 

And so he’d moved back to London, for the first time since the calendar had slipped from _16_ to _17_ , and listened to WWI unfurl from the safety of a small flat in Holborn. 

\---

Bond was born into it. His mother was the carrier, something his father hadn’t known until after the two were married (Bond would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that particular moment, the first time Andrew had made the connection between the wolves in the hills and his own dear wife), and Bond had been born full-blooded. Some of them escaped it totally; some only had partial shifts after they were adults. 

Not so much for Bond. He’d grown up knowing the wolf under his skin better than his own parents. The wolves in the hills had belonged to Monique, a pack relocated from western Switzerland to the Highlands. Technically, they had come under Bond’s heel when he was eleven, but he was too young to understand the red in his eyes and the wolves at his command, and so they’d drifted when he’d gone south with relatives he didn’t particularly like. 

He’d always kept people at a distance, afraid that he’d hurt someone. He knew that being a violent idiot came with the territory, but he didn’t want to give the wolf the room to do anything incredibly stupid. Luckily, SIS proved to be an outlet for that. It was risky, he had figured out pretty quickly that there wasn’t another non-human among the staff (not shocking, most of them had barely survived the last few hundred years), and there were only so many times you could “die” and make a perfect recovery before people started worrying. He had faked limps at first, and then moved onto shooting up weakened silver to dull his healing, but eventually he’d developed a tolerance to that, of all the stupid things. 

On the upswing, it meant that the only thing that could kill him at this point would be a silver bullet to the brain, and he’s fairly sure that people don’t just carry those around as they please. 

He’d assumed that he was alone until a vampire had sat down across the table from him on a train, heading south through France. He hadn’t known what she was at that moment, only that she’d smelled unlike any human he’d ever smelled – metal and power, a blacksmith’s forge, steel and stone. 

“Interesting,” she’d said. “We’ll talk about that later – I’m here with the money.”

He’d slipped back into quick quips and flirting to distract himself from her dark eyes, wondering what she was. 

She’d shown him, weeks later, when she had asked his permission for something. 

“For what?” He’d asked, hands on her hips, and he’d stared up at her, at her body, all perfect, unmarked skin (not so different from his own).

“This,” she said, and her fangs had been mesmerizing, her bite sharp and achingly _perfect_. She’d licked over the marks she’d left even as they healed, and she’d grinned against his skin. 

It was silly of him to think that he was the only kind of creature in the world, he’d realized. He should have known better than to get attached, when she vanished it wasn’t that shocking, but it hurt all the same. He’d ripped apart the hotel room for that one, when he’d found the note

( _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t, I’ll never be able to explain it, but my kind doesn’t stay still for long, and I’m a danger. Words, for you, always for you, please never trust another one of us. Sanguis et terra non pertinent simul._ )

and didn’t care what someone thought when they saw the walls gouged with claw marks from some unnatural animal. 

He went home. He went back to work. He wondered where Vesper had gone, where she was right now, but he never looked. He wasn’t sure he’d find her even if he tried, she probably had her ways, knew how to stay hidden. 

\---

Vesper was both amazing and terrible for his life. Q had always had a fairly normal existence, and now this, the world at his fingertips suddenly, was strange and new. 

There were no coffins involved, no returning to the earth each night, he could even still walk in the light of day, although he’d come in with a wicked sunburn (and that trait faded with time, he’s sure he could take a holiday in Egypt now and come out totally fine, if maybe for a bit of red across his nose and shoulders). All those stories, all those nightmares – all for nothing. 

Or, almost for nothing. The first time he’d taken someone’s life, he’d been too high on the transformation and the hunger to care, and Vesper had kissed him, and he’d tasted blood and he felt like his skin was made of light, but the second time was different. 

The second time it had hurt. The second time was horrible, and he felt powerless and miserable and he’d languished for weeks, body husking into nothing, before Vesper had brought him someone and he couldn’t stop himself, too hungry and young to control his own mind. 

Step and repeat. Q forces himself to get used to it. They’re in London and it makes him hate himself. They’re in Paris and he’s working at it. They’re in Belgrade and he’s gotten better. They’re in Constantinople and he’s got a slim girl pressed against a wall in the Italian section of the city, and her grip around his neck is slipping looser each moment. 

When she slips to the ground he picks her up, a limp doll of a body in his arms, and leaves her on the steps to the house he had seen her come out of. Her parents will wail, he’s sure, but they’re rich, traders with ships, enough to afford a funeral. She’d tasted like expensive spices, dotted at the nape of her neck to chase away the smells of the city. 

Vesper will get detached sometimes, wander away for days, weeks, months. Q learns to accept that as well. He vacillates between Paris and Constantinople (it is Kostantiniyye then, and later, much later, he’ll return after the war and the map will claim that it is Istanbul now) and Vesper vanishes for longer and longer periods of time. 

There are bombs falling on London and Vesper is out of his life. He’s not sure what makes him return, a city he hasn’t seen in almost 300 years, but god, it’s all strange and new. The city still whispers through back alleys, still has the same river and the same roads, but this is not the London he had left as a human. 

His flat is small, but to his liking, and he buys a radio because he’s found that his favorite part of being immortal is watching technology change, and he loves to take things apart and put them back together, wires and sparks under his fingers. 

The second time the world rises up against itself, a bomb shatters the block of flats across the street from him, and when he walks the streets the next day half of Holborn and Bloomsbury are under ash and smoke. 

His lips are a thin line, and he looks skyward, at the clouds, and feels very close to his city in that moment, their city. He’s felt a disconnect since Vesper turned him, but now he is aware that he has a community, that vampire or not, there is a larger whole. 

He watches the birth of modern warfare between the trenches and the camps and in 1945 he decides that he’s in a unique position to help fix the world. He has a hundred lifetimes to learn how to better this place, and why not? He owes it to the ground he walks on, the ground he’s sent so many people to. 

It takes years for him to settle into it, but eventually he finds himself behind a computer to help protect the place he was born to, that he calls home, and he loves the way the data sings under his hands. 

\---

Bond figures that being shot numerous times and going over a waterfall is as good a time as any to officially be “dead.”

When he wakes up his shoulder is sore in a way that he knows, from experience, means that his body has healed around a bullet and he’s going to have to dig it out. He groans, sitting up, and cracks his fingers, control of his body so natural at this point in his life that when he digs claws into his bad shoulder with a growl his other hand stays fully human. 

The fragments fall onto the wet, slick rocks, and he stays tipped over, breathing ragged, until he’s sure that everything has knit itself back together. He collects the fragments, slips them into his pocket, and picks himself up. 

He heads south, down the coast, leaves Istanbul in the dust and ends up in Fethiye. The sand is warm, the water is crystalline, and he’s never far from a drink, even though getting drunk is nigh impossible for him. He still makes a valiant effort, however. 

He ignores the wolf for three months, and then pays for it one night, when the moon is heavy in the sky and he tears out of the beach house he’s been staying in, snarling and on all fours, and he’s never run as a wolf on sand before, the ground shifting under heavy paws. He could have ignored the moon again, but it was starting to pull at his already frayed edges, and the transition is painful and angry, too fast and uncontrolled because he doesn’t try, just gives in. He’d do this as a child, although he could never push it longer than a month, and his mother would frown at him, _c’est dangereux, Jamie_. 

The next morning, when he goes to clear his head at the bar, the news is on and there is an explosion in London. 

He drives back to Istanbul, and finds that there’s room on the 1:05 into Heathrow. 

\---

Q doesn’t know about Eve for longer than he’d care to admit. In his defense, she’s old enough that she skews much more in the direction of human. There’s nothing eerie or off about her, age has rounded sharp corners. Her warm skin has never been pale like Q’s, her eyes have always been dark. She smells like sun and saltwater, not the sharp, metallic tang that even Vesper had. 

He only knows because one day she reaches out to catch a box Q has accidentally shoved off one end of his worktable, and she moves just a tick too fast, and Q catches it. She looks up at him, and he knows in that moment that she’d sensed his conclusion. 

“How old are you?” He breathes out, fascinated, because Vesper was ancient by his standards but Eve is something else. “Why are you even wasting time here?” 

“I was bored,” Eve says, shrugs, grins. “Thought I’d try my hand at being top secret and all that.” 

“You were bored.”

“You’re so young. Just you wait, you’ll get bored.” 

“I’m not that young,” Q knows he’s getting defensive, but by almost everyone’s standards he’s very _old_. It just happens that the other person in the room is not almost everyone. 

“Industrial revolution,” Eve guesses. 

“I’m not a child,” Q fires back. He doesn’t offer up that she’s only off by about 100 years, however. 

“Have you ever seen the sun rise over the Colossus?” 

Q never has. Q never will. Q was born well over a thousand years too late for that. He knows now why he never figured out what she was, she was hiding herself so well. He wonders what kind of power hides in her bones, eras upon eons. 

After that they make it a habit to go on lunch together (everyone he’s come across in his travels has one little vice, one thing that they’ve been able to keep from when they were human – Eve’s is evidently pistachios, Q’s is tea) and Eve tells him stories between broken shells and spent tea bags. No one knows who was first, that knowledge is long lost to time, but Eve knows it was someone who came down out of the mountains in the Balkans, she’s that old. She does know about fledglings from that someone, long lost, but from places that only exist in archaeology books now. By her count, she’s one of three left who can remember a time before New Kingdom, and the only one who still feels it within her to walk in the human world. 

“I’ve never understood how morose we get,” Eve says, rolling her eyes. “We’ve been given the world, and they throw that away.”

Later, months and months, Eve comes home, gets stuck behind a desk, and tells Q one night, when they’re in bed, that one of the 00s is a werewolf (Q hasn’t seen one of their kind for what has to be getting on a century), SIS thinks that she’s killed him (she laughs at that), and that she’s decided that she’ll take the desk job permanently, because she’s got a letter in mind for herself, one day (M). 

\---

Bond stares at the painting in front of him without really seeing it, waiting to meet whoever this new Q is, and nearly comes out of his skin, wolf snarling, when he smells stone and fire and steel.

The creature sits down next to him, and Bond licks his lips, can’t believe that his new quartermaster is this skinny, delicate thing that Bond knows holds massive power in his pale hands. Bond may be almost impossible to kill, too strong and too fast, but time will still end him when his body breaks down. Vampires have no such worry, and depending on how old this one is, Bond is acutely aware that he might be stronger and faster than Bond. Vesper hadn’t been as strong, but god, she’d been fast. 

After everything has gone to shit and come back (almost everything, anyway), Bond comes back and tracks Q, watching the way he laughs with Eve, easy and familiar, and he learns a few things. First of all, he’d put money on the two of them having sex. Not only do they move around each other like they know each other’s bodies, but Q smells like sun and Eve smells like steel, swapped elements from time spent together. Secondly, he learns that Q is honestly as whip smart as he plays himself up to be, and Bond finds it amusing that he’s taken to following technology through time. Vesper had told him once that their kind tended to pick a path and stick to it, but the way she’d told it the paths always seemed to be poetic, artistic, that kind of thing. This vampire, however, evidently fancies computers. 

In the same way he’d been drawn to Vesper, he finds himself drawn to Q and Eve. He goes to Q’s flat one night, finds no one home, and breaks in instead. It’s probably a very stupid thing to do, but he’s betting on Q being weaker than him. He looks like you could break him with a stiff breeze, and even if he’s faster, Bond would still win in terms of brute force. 

Q gets home a bit later, and doesn’t even bother paying Bond any attention as he breezes through the flat, dropping keys and shoes and bag here and there, and it’s only after he’s shrugged out of his jacket that he stands in front of Bond, on the other side of the coffee table, and looks down at him. 

“That was stupid,” Q says. 

“It all turned out alright,” Bond points out. 

“Only because I could smell a storm the minute I opened the front door of the building.”

“A storm?” That’s new. 

“Ozone. Your kind smells like it,” Q says, and then heads into the kitchen. Bond gets up to follow him, suddenly curious. He finds Q pulling tea out of a cabinet, taking out mugs.

“You’ve met others?”

“What, wolves? Never met, just sensed in passing. You’re more sulky and secretive than we are,” Q says. “Tea?”

They end up back on the sofa with tea, and Q puts his feet up on the coffee table, bare skin almost translucent. Bond notices that his skin is oddly blue, and when he looks up Q’s body, he sees that his chest isn’t rising and falling either. 

“You – I thought you had to breathe,” Bond says, because despite what all the books and movies would have you believe, Vesper had taught him no shortage of things. 

“Hm?” Q makes a humming noise, looking over at Bond over the top of his mug. 

“I knew a woman once, like you, she certainly did.” Bond remembers her breathy laugh, beautiful sounds he could wring out of her. 

“Oh. Some people do, out of habit. I will if I’m talking. I have to think about it though.”

“That’s unsettling.”

Q just grins at him, and it’s all fangs, and he’s reminded of how Vesper would keep hers hidden somehow, a bit of minor shifting, until she was sinking them into his neck. 

\---

Q’s not exactly sure what to do with Bond. He had realized fairly quickly that for all his brusque roughness and red eyes, Bond was without a pack. It was strange, all the things he’d ever heard about wolves suggested that lone ones tended to die in a fairly quick fashion, but according to Bond’s file he’s been in London for at least six years, probably alone that whole time. 

With this in mind, he’s not exactly surprised when Bond starts hanging around Eve and him, but that just seems like it’s asking for trouble, a wolf and two vampires making up some joke of a pack. 

Q has a young man cornered in the dark under a viaduct one night, his hands around Q’s waist, his breathing shallow, when Q senses a wolf on the wind. Q pulls back, licking his lips and frowning. The man sags in his arms, murmuring something, and Q picks him up, lets his head loll against his shoulder, and he deposits the man on the low wall at the edge of the sidewalk, pushing back his fringe and pressing a kiss to his forehead. 

“You’ll be fine,” Q tells him, tipping his head up with long fingers so that he can stare him in the eyes. The man just nods, and Q smiles at him before straightening up and staring across the street. Bond is skulking about under a street light, and Q schools his face blank, crossing the street towards Bond. 

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner,” Bond says, smooth, and Q just shakes his head with a sigh. 

“What are you doing here?” Q asks. 

“Curiosity,” Bond says simply, with a shrug. 

“You keep doing incredibly stupid things around me,” Q says. “You must be an absolute idiot – you were right about interrupting. How do you know that was enough, or that I’d fed recently? Werewolves are supposed to be sweeter, you know.”

Bond just watches him with even eyes, the human blue almost gold in the light of the streetlamp. 

“That’s going to get you killed one day,” Q says. 

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not a cat,” Bond says, and his smirk is insufferable. 

“You shouldn’t be out alone around here,” Q says, and slips his arm through Bond’s to guide him towards his flat. 

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” Bond says as they walk. 

“Baby vampires are obnoxious, none the less,” Q says, and Bond laughs at that. 

“I suppose that makes you one.”

“Hardly.” 

Q lets him explore his flat, knowing that between the wolf and being an SIS agent Bond probably has a fanatical need to know every nook and cranny of his surroundings. He’s frankly somewhat surprised that Bond hadn’t done that when he’d first come here. Maybe he felt some twisted sense of duty that begged permission. 

Q sits down on the sofa with his laptop, and eventually Bond drifts back, sitting down next to him and watching him with sharp eyes. 

“So have I put myself in harm’s way by ruining your dinner plans?” He asks finally, when he’s settled back into the cushions. 

“You’re not in danger of having your throat ripped out, no,” Q says. 

“I’d like to see you try,” Bond says, with a little curl of laughter, and Q decides that Bond needs a bit of a lesson. He’s pleased to see that Bond’s eyes are wide when, in the space of half a heartbeat, Q’s got his laptop closed and on the coffee table, and he’s straddling Bond, his wrists clamped under Q’s thin fingers, bones shifting as Q squeezes. 

“Your kind is slow,” Q says. “Brute strength won’t matter if you can’t catch me to stop me.”

Bond’s eyes drop red, and when he snarls at Q he’s got fangs. Q just stares at him until Bond rips his wrists free, rubbing at one of them. There’s a loud snap as something slots back into place and Q knows that he must have broken one of Bond’s wrists. 

“You think I don’t know anything about vampires,” Bond says, low and quiet, “and you’re quite wrong on that point.” 

“I find that hard to believe,” Q says. They stare at each other, black eyes and red, before Bond’s lips shift into a smirk, and suddenly Q knows that he does know about vampires, because the way he twists his neck to the side, displaying smooth skin, never dropping Q’s eyes, speaks volumes. That’s a nice move he’s picked up somewhere, and it’s all vampire and not an once of wolf – Q had done it for Vesper no small number of times, he’d do it for Eve if she asked, others, younger, had done it for Q. 

“Wrong again,” Bond breathes. 

“You’re an idiot,” Q murmurs. Bond rolls his hips under Q’s spread legs, and Q sucks in a breath through his nose, an automatic reaction even though it’s unnecessary. 

Bond lets him hold his wrists this time, first and middle fingers of his right hand curled over Bond’s pulse point, and it’s strange, when he bites in and immediately starts fighting Bond’s healing reflex – not something he’s ever had to do with another vampire. 

He’s been told that wolves are something else, but he’s still not quite expecting it when it seems like Bond has sparks in his veins, something he’s never experienced in his life, and he’s wondering if he has the self control to pull away from this. However, the choice is made for him when the top most layer of Bond’s memories hit him and he pulls back like he’s been shot, staggering off of Bond’s lap, a hand to his mouth, blood on his fingers. 

Bond is looking up at him through hazy red eyes, lust and lack of blood, and Q drags a finger across his own lip, warm and slick. Bond watches the movement, but he looks confused now too. 

“So she’s still alive, then,” Q says quietly. He’d seen Vesper, as clear as day, swirling around Bond’s memories, not even five years ago, in Venice.

“Who?” Bond asks, chest heaving. 

“Vesper,” Q says, and watches Bond’s eyes slide back to human at the mention of her name. 

“You knew her.” 

“She was – _is_ , my maker,” Q says. For a moment they’re both quiet, and then, “I’m going to bed. There are blankets in the hall cupboard.” 

He leaves Bond on his couch, and he’s not shocked in the least to find the blankets untouched and the flat empty in the morning. 

\---

Bond’s not sure what to do with the information he’s just gotten. When he leaves Q’s flat, the night cool and promising spring, he stands on the steps for a moment and rubs a hand over the punctures that have already healed. When he finally makes a decision about where to go he hits the bottom step on all fours, and although the pull of the moon is weak (it’s just a sliver in the sky) the wolf is more than happy to be out. 

He sticks to back roads and narrow alleys, not hard to find in this party of the city, although honestly, if anyone saw him, they’d probably either assume he was some mutant fox (his coloring might not be red, but it’s light) or that they were drunk and seeing things. He moves much faster than any normal animal ever could, and it’s easy to hug the shadows. 

What he’s not expecting is to run into Eve on her street. It’s late enough that he assumed she’d be asleep, but here she is, standing not five feet from him, having just come around the corner. The red-headed woman on Eve’s arm gives a little shriek at the sight of a giant, red-eyed wolf in the middle of the pavement and Eve turns to her immediately, _shh, shhh, it’s fine, look here_ – 

Eve looks straight at the woman, smiling, mumming something that Bond’s ears can only pick up because he’s not human ( _I’m sorry, not tonight, oh, I know, chin up, I’ll see you tomorrow_ ), and she kisses the woman before sending her back towards the traffic somewhere in the distance, something that Bond’s human mind supplies as _Sloane Street_. 

Bond’s frozen in place, wondering what exactly to do about this situation. Also, if he’s ever going to rib on Eve for the fact that she evidently likes gingers, he’d have to admit that he was the giant scary wolf in the street. She’s also remarkably collected, given the situation. 

“Little Red Ridding Hood kick you out?” Eve asks. “He’s flighty sometimes. He’s got a remarkable talent for getting at people’s memories, but he tends to find things he doesn’t like.” 

Bond shifts without much thought, adjusting his cuffs when he’s standing on human feet again. 

“There’s not much to like in my head,” Bond says, even though his heart is beating in his chest so loudly he’s sure even Eve can hear it. He has absolutely no idea how she knows – she’s human, and he’s never done anything stupid around her. Except maybe not staying dead, that’s a bit of a big one. And yet here she is, with the knowledge he’s a wolf and he’d come from Q’s. 

“I’m sure,” Eve says, and starts up her steps, pulling keys from her pocket. “Don’t stand there, I’m inviting you in.”

“How did you know?” Bond asks as they head up the stairs, old marble worn by millions of steps. 

“Summer storms in Gaul,” Eve says, and Bond has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but something pings – Q had said that he’d smelled like a storm. Eve can’t be like Q though, that’s impossible. Bond’s had her hands on him before – she wasn’t cold like Q had been, her lips are always flush, she has to be human. And he’d know if she was a wolf. 

“What are you?” He asks after Eve has shut the door behind them. 

“Q hasn’t told you?” 

“We didn’t do much talking. He broke my wrist, I scared him off, I came over here.”

“He broke your wrist?” Eve looks delighted. “Oh, you must have made him quite angry, he’s not that strong normally.” 

“A summer storm in Gaul,” Bond says instead, because he needs to know how Eve knows all this. She can’t be something else, he’d know. 

“You don’t know your own history?” Eve asks, and Bond just stares at her. “The one wild tribe, who flew a wolf banner and no legion could take down, despite them numbering barely 25?” 

“Cadeyrn?” Bond asks, incredulous. “That’s a bedtime story for pups. And he was a Celt, not a Gaul.” His mother had told him that one when he was young, supposedly Cyn Cadeyrn was an ancient Celtic warrior who had made a pact with the gods in return for victory in war. What had resulted were the first wolves. Bond personally thinks it has a lot more to do with mutation than divine intervention, considering it’s transferred like a disease in those who weren’t born in to it. 

“I was there,” Eve says, popping open a tin and offering it to him. He stares down at the nuts, pistachios, and then looks back up at her. 

“Eve, you have 60 seconds to answer my original question or I return the waterfall favor.” It’s said as a joke, but there’s malice behind his words, and he means it. If Eve is a threat, he needs to remove that threat. 

“You couldn’t kill me,” Eve says. “I’m faster and stronger than you.”

“What, are you some sort of earth bound god?”

“Nothing so ridiculously dramatic, just the same as Q.”

“That’s impossible.”

Eve cracks a nut open, and looks at him as she pops it into her mouth. 

“Q’s young. If he’s your only experience with our kind you’re going to get a few things wrong.” 

“I knew another once,” Bond says, and he can’t wrap his head around this. She’s so… normal. “She was old.”

“Not as old as me,” Eve says, shrugs. “What was her name?”

“Vesper.”

Eve’s eyes are hard, and she licks her lips. The lid goes back on the tin, and she sets it on the counter before looking back at him. 

“So that’s what sent Q running.” Bond just nods in response. “I’m not sure if Q’s aware, but he really does feel memories to an absurd level, much more than any one else I’ve ever met. He’s weak physically, but not mentally. I think he probably feels them more than I do. It’s been almost 100 years since he’s seen her.” 

“I thought your kind stuck together, makers and all that.”

“Some do. Vesper never did. Q probably won’t if he ever has any fledglings, although I don’t see him doing that.” 

Bond reaches out for Eve, and she lets him trail his fingers down her neck, down to the beat of her pulse in her neck. He still has so many questions, and she’s so warm, the sun caught beneath her skin. 

“You’re too human to be like that,” he murmurs, and she smiles, something almost sad. 

“Q’s very _in_ human. He’s a bad benchmark.”

When he kisses her she tastes like saltwater and her lips are warm under his. 

\---

Q doesn’t get much sleep, and in the morning, a Saturday, he decides to make the long walk to Eve’s flat, early, just as the sun is creeping over the tops of buildings. He’d never been big on sleep, not even as a human. 

It had been a shock to find out that the anger that thrums under Bond’s skin isn’t all wolf – it’s also from betrayal, and at the hands of someone Q knows. It had been strange to see Vesper in that moment, as if he was in bed with her in Venice, and it hadn’t sat well with him. Vesper wasn’t something that was part of his life anymore. He hadn’t felt betrayed when she left, but Bond had. 

It does explain a few things though. If Bond really has been alone for as long as Q thinks he has, it must have been nice to sleep with someone whom he didn’t have to hide from, and it also explains why Bond’s view of vampires skews more towards human and away from creature. Vesper had been very human, not like Eve, but something close. Q has always been too cold, too silent, too inhuman. Vesper had told him once that his turning had been rough, fighting not only the dagger in his stomach but also the first strains of plague in his system (and so there went that, he knows now that he never would have survived even if he hadn’t been knifed), and something that she had talked about almost wistfully – _a flame_. Q had been very, very human, and very angry, young and brash in that moment, and it meant that what he was flipped to was something very divorced from whatever human he might have been while alive. 

He has a key to Eve’s flat, and he’s halfway up the steps when it hits him. Ozone. Bond is here. The flat is quiet when he opens the door, the hinges creaking ever so slightly, and he leaves his keys in the bowl by the door and stands awkwardly in the hall, wondering what to do. There’s sun and sky on his tongue and they fit together perfectly, and something slams into him like a wall when he realizes it – Bond doesn’t want a pack. He _has_ a pack, and Q had gone running away like an idiot last night. 

Q strips things off, leaving them on a chair in the hall, and when he slips into Eve’s bedroom he finds both of them asleep, the first bit of sun curling across their skin, so unlike his own pale coloring. He slips into bed in nothing but his pair of well-worn jeans, and Eve stirs a bit when he curls up behind her, her fingers coming up to lace with his across one of her shoulders. 

“I figured you’d show up,” she says, and he smiles into her hair. It doesn’t take him long to fall asleep at all. 

\---

When Bond wakes up – all at once, neither wolf nor agent letting him linger – he’s aware that someone else is in bed with them. Q’s got an arm draped over Eve’s bare waist. Somehow, he’s not incredibly shocked about this turn of events. 

As if he can tell that he’s being watched Q cracks open one eye, looking at Bond over the curve of Eve’s neck. 

“Are you going to say something clever?” Q asks, voice still rough with sleep. 

“No,” Bond says, grins. “Eve had some excellent quips about you being Little Red Ridding Hood last night though-“

“Oh good lord,” Q says, rolling over onto his back and pressing a hand to his face. Eve, who is evidently awake, is grinning, a small little curve to her lips. 

“You do realize that it was implied that you’re the Big Bad Wolf?” Eve asks, opening her eyes and smirking at Bond. 

“I’ll take it,” Bond says, and Q groans from somewhere on Eve’s other side. 

“I can’t deal with you two,” Q says. Eve just smiles before rolling over to press a kiss to his forehead, and then she slips out of bed, and Bond watches her head out into the hall for something. 

“I’m sorry,” Q says after a bit, and Bond looks at him, confused. 

“What, for last night? It’s fine,” Bond says. “You’re not Vesper.”

“No,” Q says, sighs. “I’m not.”

Bond reaches out, pulls their bodies together, and Q tucks his head under Bond’s chin. Q’s skin is strange, cold in some places and warm in others from the blankets and Eve, and the kiss he presses to Bond’s chest makes him shiver. 

When Eve comes back she lays down on Bond’s other side, and he rolls onto his back, looking up at her. There’s fire in her eyes, and Bond reaches up to cup her cheek. She curls her fingers over his hand, smiling, and for a long moment neither of them moves before he nods. 

Eve is at his neck, Q at his opposite shoulder, and he can’t help the groan that rips out of his throat when two pairs of fangs sink into his skin. Eve’s hands are warm, Q’s cold, and he arches under them, and he can’t help digging claws into the smooth expanse of their skin. When his eyes open they’re red and there are sparks in his blood and fire dancing across his mind.


End file.
